Website Review

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/

 BBC’s Learning English website was created by producers, writers, and ELT professionals. I remember that a friend had told me she learned English from this website and kept it in mind as she had a very good level of English despite never having lived abroad. The various free audios, videos and text materials are for global audiences.  The layout of the website is organized and attractive, and the tabs easy to navigate.

 There is plenty of content that can be found and the videos and texts are engaging and entertaining.  The website presents realistic, up-to-date, actual English needed by learners to develop in their English studies and there’s something for everyone whether they want to focus on grammar, vocab, or improve pronunciation.  There are many manageable courses and activities such as 6-minute grammar, where you can learn phrasal verbs or practice a certain tense with audios and quizzes and 6-minute vocabulary, where you learn words from podcasts with transcripts and they have all the vocabulary words explained.  For English learners, working through BBC English would require a lot of listening and reading practice from everyday dialogues to news articles.  This is a great way to improve comprehension and be exposed to good-quality, relevant, and authentic material.

 Some categories are everyday English, learn with News, business English and Stories for Kids.  It’s extremely easy to search for things according to your level and there are full length courses but each component in the course can also be studied alone.  There are quizzes after the audios for learners to test comprehension and you have access to the transcript and subtitles to each audio.  One downside is that listening activities for the beginner level are hard to find. The website is also available as an app.

 Another possible con is that while the readings are for everyone, most of the audio is in British English which may not be suitable for beginners who are more familiar with American English.  However, I do recommend this website because it is one of the best I found that would work well both for learners looking to improve their English communication skills and as a teacher resource as they also provide multimedia English language teaching materials.